Bill Maher, Ben Affleck Clash Over ‘Mafia Like’ Radical Islam [Video]

Bill Maher and Gone Girl actor Ben Affleck got into a heated debate about radical Islam on Maher’s HBO show Friday night, with Maher at one point comparing Islamic extremists to the mafia.

During the discussion, Affleck, a well-known liberal Democrat, strongly denounced what he called the gross and racist stereotyping of the majority of Muslims who are in no way extreme.

Last week on Real Time with Bill Maher, the host and self-declared atheist claimed that political correctness causes liberals to look the other way when it comes to radical Islam.

“If we’re giving no quarter to intolerance, shouldn’t we be starting with the mutilators and honor killers?” rhetorically asked Maher on that episode.

When one of the other panelists last night noted that the media seldom provides a platform for moderate Muslims, Maher declared, “One reason they don’t get exposed is because they’re afraid to speak out because it’s the only religion that acts like the mafia that will f****** kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book. There’s a reason why Ayaan Hirsi Ali needs bodyguards 24/7.”

Earlier in the tense Maher-Affleck segment, Maher asked the actor, “But you’re saying the idea that someone should be killed if they leave the Islamic religion is just a few bad apples?”

Affleck responded, “The people who would actually believe in that you murder someone if they leave Islam is not the majority of Muslims at all.”

Later in the discussion, Maher insisted, “I can show you a Pew poll of Egyptians. They are not outliers in the Muslims world. It’s like 90 percent of them believe death is the appropriate response to leaving the religion. If 90 percent of Brazilians thought that death was the appropriate response to leaving Catholicism, you would think it was a bigger deal.”

“I would think it’s a big deal no matter what,” Affleck declared. The actor/director also suggested that pundits are overreacting to ISIS because “ISIS couldn’t couldn’t fill a Double-A ballpark in Charleston, West Virginia.”

Watch the Bill Maher-Ben Affleck exchange and draw your own conclusions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XduMMteTEbc

Earlier this month, Bill Maher generated some buzz when he strongly disagreed with an attempt by a visibly uncomfortable Charlie Rose, a liberal journalist, to equate Islam with Christianity.

In July, Bill Maher, who gave a million bucks to the Barack Obama reelection effort, referred to liberals as acting like “useless Obama hacks without a shred of intellectual honesty” for similarly clamming up about NSA spying under Obama, a constitutional and privacy violation that would have made them “apoplectic” if it was taking place during the G.W. Bush presidential administration.

Do you think that Bill Maher is engaging in Islamophobia as Ben Affleck seems to be suggesting?

[image via Randy Miramontez / Shutterstock.com]